


intangibles

by tothemoon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Era, M/M, Moderate Longing, Pre-Relationship, Realization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:36:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24593140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon
Summary: Some days,nowadays, he'll call it what it is: not hunger, not lust, not dying. Take away the words, the names, and it's just one, wanting the other.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou (Minor), Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Comments: 11
Kudos: 184





	intangibles

It starts when Atsumu falls into a riverbank. In truth it is _not_ a riverbank, but a stream, barely the width of a closet, and not nearly as deep. But Atsumu would tell everyone it was an ocean if he could, just to say that he’d raised himself out of it with his own hands.

Instead, he is sitting with his pants wet near the top of Mount Ikoma. The water, parading downstream, cares nothing of his struggles. The birds here don't sing, they taunt. And at the top of the mountain, he knows all he’ll get is a children's amusement park and a few broadcasting towers to show for the journey, along with a lackluster cable car ride on the way down. But he goes because Shouyou goes, towards a place they'll end up by day’s end.

There’s a lull, before Shouyou notices. Atsumu lives in those split seconds, because that's what the best setters do — live, and eat, and breathe the moments in between. He observes: Shouyou, glancing upward at their country’s trees, their country’s birds. The way he finds a native sky, just returned to. Shouyou smacks his hands to his face, as if to press the last of the jet lag out of him, and bounds forward for the rest of the hike ahead. He stops. He turns. He remembers Atsumu, _remembers_ being a pejorative term; because Atsumu would much rather sink to the bottom of the ocean, than be anyone’s afterthought.

“Atsumu-san! How did you end up there?”

Shouyou kicks off his shoes and socks. He wades to where Atsumu is, and makes moving downstream look like ascension. A hand goes outstretched, generous in the gaps of fingers, callouses on palms like small, white hills. Atsumu’s always liked callouses on others, as one might with pretty faces, or certain heights, or builds: he likes the effort of making new skin out of something soft, then taking those trusted hands into his own.

And that's what Shouyou’s hand is — calloused, and warm, with a grip firmer than anyone would ever expect. Atsumu lets himself rest in the touch for a moment, before rising from the water with Shouyou’s pull.

 _Ah_ , says the rattle of wind through the trees, and the taunting birds above. They fly away, towards the summit. In another lull, Atsumu observes: the calloused hand connected to an arm full of fine lines, an arm connected to shoulders, broader than ever. There is a body, and it belongs to Shouyou; there is a body, and Atsumu knows it wants to go to the top.

He lets his hand stay in another, and squeezes. He welcomes Shouyou back to the country, by the way of a lingering grip.

* * *

In truth, Mount Ikoma had been Atsumu’s idea. He calls them _tests of courage._ It's something he’s decided to do with every new teammate now, to gauge for a many number of things, like stamina, speed, and chemistry. “It's foolproof,” he explains to Osamu over the phone the next morning, still drowsy in bed from said hike up to Mount Ikoma. “That way, I’ll know if he has what it takes to play with me.”

“I thought you already knew that, though.” On the other end, Osamu is taking breakfast at his shop, and it dawns on Atsumu to make a meal for himself, too. “You said so once on the court, and then you wouldn't shut up about him for a week straight at home.”

“Yeah, but I was young then.”

“Oh? Then what are you now?” Osamu asks.

“Wise.”

On the other end, comes a series of coughs, like Osamu’s choking. Atsumu thinks to call an ambulance, before he hears something resembling a laugh.

“I'm serious,” Atsumu says. “It’s good to know if he's the real deal, you know?”

“That just sounds like an excuse to spend more time with him.”

For a moment, Atsumu lets his vision blur across the ceiling. He could lie, maybe, and say this isn't the case; or he could tell the truth, and let every listening god know what he’s after.

“Even if it is,” he says, “what's the harm in that? He’ll get to know me, and I’ll see what he’s really made of.”

“I feel like you already know that, though. What he’s made of.” Osamu says nothing more after that, just a hum that sounds like, _well, don't get lost, on your way to the ends of the earth._

 _Yes, yes, I know,_ Atsumu hums back.

The call ends, and Atsumu keeps his eyes on the ceiling. When he presses a hand to his stomach, hungry for a day’s first meal, he thinks, instead, of places to go next.

* * *

Atsumu knows two things: one, he is not a man of science, and two, he has never been in love. He knows he will never be a man of science, and that he will never be in love, because he trusts the science people to tell him that love is nothing but the body, reacting to chemicals. He doesn't know what the chemicals are, and doesn't plan on knowing them, but he likes the authority of it — _Chemical Reactions._ He thinks of love in the way hunger exists: just another change in the body, or temporary insanity by the way of something gone missing. Some days, most days, he'll even call it what it is: not hunger, even, but good-old-fashioned lust. Take away the romance, the science, and it's just bodies wanting bodies.

“They'll be sick of each other in a week,” Atsumu says to Shouyou one day after practice. Currently, they're sitting on a bench together in the gym, watching intently as Bokuto puts an arm around Akaashi, who’s come to visit from Tokyo.

“No,” Shouyou says. “I think it’s more serious than that.”

Quiet follows, a lull like humidity before a storm. Atsumu’s noticed it a few times before: how Shouyou makes new air all around him, and the way it swells with all things belief. One moment, he’s a boy, believing in Kageyama Tobio’s tosses, and the next, he’s a young man, believing in the ones Atsumu offers. Or, _no_. Maybe it's not belief — Atsumu doesn't like the word, because it’s a sentiment that keeps no promises. What Shouyou carries is expectation: for the tosses to keep coming, and for things to work out, even when they never look like storybook endings.

Arms still over shoulders, Bokuto says something that makes Akaashi laugh. Shouyou smiles at the scene, like he speaks their language, and Atsumu thinks to give them two weeks instead of one.

* * *

Atsumu does not believe. He sees. And if he likes what he sees, then so be it.

Maybe it’d started then, all those years ago, when they were kids on opposite sides of the net. Atsumu had seen him then, yes, but only in the way one sees a rare bird in the branches: there, maybe, in the moment, before flying away the next. Believing was the exception then. It's a secret Atsumu keeps, in case people might think of him as less for dreaming; how he’d believed then, in what Shouyou might become, and in the paths he'd take to fly back.

In another stream en route to the top, Shouyou nicks his heel on the jagged edge of bedrock. It's nothing serious, probably not even enough to leave a scar, but Atsumu would be damned than risk playing time because of river gunk. He tells Shouyou to sit, and to keep his foot raised, while he applies a scrunched-up baseball cap to the cut. “It's all I’ve got,” he says, when he regrets all the times Kita-san’s told him to carry bandaids in his backpack.

Shouyou winces, but he also laughs. It's small, barely the huff of breath, but Atsumu takes it as a sign to press on.

Past the cloth of the cap, Atsumu notices all the little marks across the foot, the scars and smoothed-over scabs. He laughs too, when he remembers the places Shouyou’s walked.

“You're used to this, huh?” Atsumu asks.

And Shouyou beams, like pride incarnate.

* * *

Sharing the same waters, Atsumu needs no belief. He holds Shouyou by the ankle, pressure applied, and pretends he hasn't already stopped the bleeding.

* * *

Imagine.

Trying to sleep, this is the last thing Atsumu wants to do, _imagine._

_Imagine anyway —_

— learning a body, without taking the shirt off its back. A neck gathering sweat. A knee pad sliding up, snug to fit around the bend of a leg. A face, all red from running. A tongue sticking out, when he smiles for pictures with fans who ask. There is a body, and it is Shouyou’s; there is a body, and Atsumu wishes he didn’t have to see it, half-dreaming.

Atsumu kicks his comforter off and reaches for his phone, still charging on the desk. The time, 1:38 AM. He thinks of sleep like a distant thing, and spites the people who've found slumber: his brother in the next room, his teammates, the neighbors who get up at dawn to feed their pet birds.

When he was younger, he'd make a game out of sleepless nights. Atsumu would think, _how cool of me_ , to be the only one awake at this hour; to be the only one to see the world in the night. He'd wander the hallways of his house and pet with strays in the street. The sun would come up, just over the hills, and ten-year old Atsumu would say he was the first to meet its light.

“Did you know that the sun came to meet me, before anyone else?” he would embellish to Osamu, and Osamu would just make fun of the bags under his brother’s eyes.

He scrolls to his contacts, a lit screen his only star. _Shouyou,_ it says, just _Shouyou_ , and Atsumu reads the name so much it no longer looks like a word.

* * *

“Shouyou-kun,” he calls, at 1:40 AM, five hours from sunrise. “Are you up?”

* * *

Coming downhill, Shouyou is the one who looks like courage, if it had a name. A bike light stays on. A bell rings despite the hour, and wheels hum like buzzing bugs. Past Atsumu, Shouyou nearly clips him on the way down with a handlebar, leaving nothing but the breeze of a constant momentum.

“Sorry, Atsumu-san!” says Shouyou. “Once I can stop, I'll come back for you!”

A light grows back uphill, and Shouyou peddles back up to the curb. Atsumu learns, then, that never stopping means returning too — down hills, up hills, past seas and native countries, to a curb where they promised to meet, not thirty minutes before. And Shouyou looks no worse for the wear for it; in fact, 2:00 AM suits him, like the surprise of things that shouldn't go together (but do). Like salty and sweet. A bear making friends with a dog. Shouyou in the night, a sun in the dark.

“So you did come back for me.” _For me_. “And here I thought you'd be riding all the way back to Brazil.”

“Not before I pass this test of courage,” Shouyou says.

“Test of courage?”

“Yeah,” Shouyou says. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”

It dawns on Atsumu that he has no tests of courage to offer. He thinks to make something up on the spot, but by 2:00 AM his mouth’s run dry with even the smallest ability to lie.

“No.” Atsumu swears there's an echo in the answer, like the whole world can hear him lay the facts bare. It reminds him of the single raised fists before serves, the quiet before reckoning: _you are here because I wanted you here. Simple as that._

“That's fine,” says Shouyou. “Besides, I don't think I like the name.”

“The name?”

“Of these tests.” Shouyou walks on with his bike. “ _Courage_? They make it sound like I should be scared of you.”

“And you're not?” Atsumu asks.

Shouyou turns, to answer. “Never,” he says with a grin, and Atsumu is compelled to follow.

Up the road, Shouyou goes, and one wonders if he'll just speed off on his bike again. But he stays, fine to take in streetlights like he’s the powering the whole city; he stops, and Atsumu finds himself catching up for once.

* * *

For Bokuto, it is not something he can explain in tangible terms: “you know, it was just FWUAH,” he says, “and lots of worrying, but it just clicked, at the end of the day.”

Atsumu sits with him on a bench at the end of practice. Shouyou, who’s gone to chase around stray balls, runs around on court, laughing with the rest of the staff.

“And it was all just okay?” Atsumu asks. “It didn't feel like you were dying?”

“Oh, no, it definitely felt like dying,” Bokuto confirms. “ _Still_ feels like dying, sometimes, when it catches you off guard. But, it comes less. ‘Cause your body adjusts to the other person, I think. It says, _ah,_ I’m not in danger. Not when he’s here, right next to me.”

“You should write poetry,” Atsumu suggests, mostly a joke.

“Tsum-Tsum,” Bokuto says with sudden gravity. “You think Akaashi would like that?”

Atsumu bounds off the bench, before he’s forced to give him a serious answer. He joins Shouyou on court, on the other side of the net like the days he’ll never forget.

“Shouyou-kun,” he calls, picking up the last ball. He presents it to Shouyou, grinning, and waits for him to come running towards his side again.

* * *

Some days, _nowadays_ , he'll call it what it is: not hunger, not lust, not dying. Take away the words, the names, and it's just one, wanting the other.

* * *

On another restless night, the two of them ride until morning. Shouyou, at the wheel, and Atsumu standing over ticking spokes. He watches a city whir by, theirs for the taking, and lets it fall away, to let other senses rise.

His hands dig into Shouyou’s shoulders, honest at the rush of the hurdle downhill. Atsumu leans forward, cheek close to the shell of Shouyou’s ear, and lets himself brace for whatever may come.

(They don't crash, not that day at least, but all Atsumu can think of is colliding: head-on, full-stop, and forever.)

“Let's wait for sunrise,” Atsumu tells him.

Shouyou grins wide at the bottom of the hill, bike lying on the grass by the riverbank. He knows not to count this as another test, courage or otherwise.

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello please consider this a spiritual gift for atsuhina week but because this doesn't fall into any real prompts i'll just let it float in the ether aisdjasdasd
> 
> also, you can call this fic a prequel to [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24375529), which i wrote earlier in the month!
> 
> also u can find me [on twitter at @sixthmoons!](https://twitter.com/sixthmoons)


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